Building Stronger Communities: A Comprehensive Model for Effective Community Engagement

As there has been quite a lot of “community engagement” talk coming my way lately, I thought I’d share my model for Building Stronger Communities. I originally penned this in 2017 when I launched my community development training program to demonstrate how the different elements of my own community development experience overlapped with one another — a way to help public services and community organisations understand the different dynamics to “work with” rather than “deliver to” communities. At the time, the local buzzword was “creating resilient communities,” so that was the original title. However, I later decided to rename it “Building Stronger Communities” as I feel it is more open-ended; there may be other things that I or other people discover at a later date that can make communities even stronger. Even now, my own criticism is that perhaps I should rename it “Building Stronger Community-led Services”, that this diagram appears static and serves as a foundation rather than an end result. Also, the world has changed since 2020 (e.g. the global pandemic, the cost of living, increased operational costs, reduction in grant funding, etc.), and I would now try to incorporate more methods of survival and sustainability, such as adopting agile principles, being more entrepreneurial and/or innovative. I am particularly interested in these latter three methods/cultures, and they feature heavily in my day-to-day work with Cwmpas and the Start Something Good project. However, I’m still in the process of studying their adoption and impact.

However, I still believe my original diagram is a solid foundation to attain, and therefore I thought it may be useful to share. Let’s work from the outside in…

On the outer circle, we have the PESTLE factors: Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental. These are outside forces that we have very little control over, but they can certainly have an effect on us. Just take a minute to consider how each of these factors has changed in the UK since 2020, just three years ago: how the economy has been affected, how we became dependent on technology during the pandemic, how much trust we have in our UK Government, how technology has effected the way we socialise… and I’m writing this on a day where the world is experiencing unprecedented heatwaves across Europe. Okay, some are closer to home than others, but one cannot deny that the vast majority of livelihoods and, therefore, communities have been somehow significantly affected by one or more of these factors over the past three years.

The next circle is the filled circle that encompasses the following three methods for “Connectivity.” This represents the “gold dust” of any community engagement — trust, along with its partnering attributes of transparency, equality of cooperation — as I have discussed in a previous blog. I have specifically made this a filled circle to signify that this is by no means an easy task; like wading through water, you cannot quickly skip into coproduction, ABCD, or person-centered approaches without dedicating the time to build genuine trust between both parties… and that takes time.

The next element of the diagram are the three equally intertwined circles that represent “Connectivity”, these are: -

Co-production — “working with” as opposed to “doing to.” I have my own definition that I’ve used for co-production, which is “To co-design, co-deliver, and co-own a product or service in an equal and reciprocal manner.”

Asset-Based Community Development — focusing on the strengths (or assets) of a community, such as its people, physical assets, etc., for sustainable community development.

Person-Centred Approaches — working with individuals to recognize their strengths/assets. The model that I personally prefer is the individual asset mapping technique that I recently shared in a previous blog that can be found here.

Although I witness many service designers applying co-production, Asset-Based Community Development or Person-Centred Approaches, I very rarely witness all three being used. ABCD and Coproduction together — yes, but not so much of the Person Centred Approaches and I would argue that all three are completely dependent on one another.

For example, to build trust and encourage meaningful participation, engagement is incredibly difficult to acquire en masse. Therefore, one needs to engage on an individual level at first (via Person-Centred Approaches), to build a trusting relationship with key individuals, such as those identified by Malcolm Gladwell (Connectors, Mavens, and Salespeople). Then, sticking with Gladwell, the relationship with the individual inspires them to advocate and encourage wider participation:

“There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them… That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements.”

Gladwell, M (2000) The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Little Brown Publishing

As a social movement(s) grows that is enthusiastic to participate, you are thereby creating a community willing to engage in Asset-Based Community Development. Furthermore, by engaging individuals in Person-Centred Approaches, it also builds confidence; enough confidence so that individual community members can participate equally and reciprocally when it comes to co-production*.

*In a number of personal experiences in facilitating what were meant to be co-production events, I have had to mediate the situation to maintain an equal balance of participation, voice, and power. Yet, on a number of occasions, as soon as I have withdrawn my involvement as a mediator, the service provider (i.e. the “professionals”) quickly unbalance the level of hierarchy in their favour. Therefore, experience tells me that we need a more confident community if it is to maintain said balance.

ABCD and Co-production then go hand-in-hand; Co-production is an assets-based approach while ABCD requires the involvement and assets of all those involved in the co-production exercise.

While co-production and ABCD are more widely adopted, Person-Centred Approaches are less commonly seen, and it’s easy to understand why; working with individuals is time-consuming, intense, unpredictable, complex, resource-heavy, and can even be intimidating for some. It’s certainly not something that can be taken lightly or delivered quickly, but execute it well, and the rewards are unprecedented.

For the reasons mentioned above, I strongly believe that these three elements need to work in unison as a single system to be as effective as possible.

Back to the diagram! The blue in between each of the three “Connectivity” circles represents their ongoing “Development” and sustainability. To achieve this, work continues; relationships need to be strengthened, engagement requires widening, involvement on an equal and reciprocal level needs to be maintained, and all involved need to feel a sense of ownership.

Finally, with all this in place, there should now be a strong foundation for more resourceful, resilient, and stronger public services and the communities that access them.

I hope that helps and feel free to add comments on how I could update this diagram or make it more comprehensive. This is simply a diagram that I use to explain my own experience of building stronger communities and the services they access. It would be great to hear the perspectives of others out there.

Until next time!

Paul